GREENBERG, Uri Zvi

Nationality: Ukrainian. Born: Bialykamien, Ukraine, 17 October 1898. Military Service: Austrian army, 1915-17; deserted, 1917. Fought with guerrilla groups seeking to establish an independent Jewish nation in Palestine, 1940s. Career: Lived in Warsaw and Berlin; moved to Palestine, 1924; worked for the Revisionist movement, Warsaw, 1929-39. Contributor, Davar, newspaper of the Labor Party; Revisionist party representative, Zionist Congresses, Poland; active in right-wing politics. Member, Israeli parliament, one term. Award: Israel prize, 1957. Died: 8 May 1981.

Publications

Collections

Kol ketavav (15 vols.). 1990.

Ma'amarim. 2001.

Poetry

Ergits oyf felder. 1915.

In tsaytens roysh. 1919.

Farnakhtengold. 1921.

Mefisto. 1921.

Emah gedolah ve-yareah. 1925.

Ha-Gavrut ha-'olah. 1926.

Hazon ehad ha-ligyonot. 1927.

Anakre'on 'al kotev ha-'itsavon 11 sha'are shir. 1928.

Kelev bayit. 1929.

Ezor magen u-ne'um ben ha-dam. 1929.

Sefer ha-kitrug veha-emunah. 1936.

Yerushalayim shel matah. As Jerusalem, 1939.

Rehovot hanahar: Sefer ha 'iliyot yehakoah. 1951; as Streets of the River: The Book of Dirges and Power, in Anthology of Modern Hebrew Poetry, 1966.

The Mercy of Sorrow (English translations). 1965.

Mivhar mi-shirav. 1968.

Albatros. 1977.

Undzere oyseyes glien. 1978.

Other

Krig oyf dem erd. 1923.

Kelape tish'im ve-tish'ah. 1928.

Ha-Don, with Peretz Hirschbein. 1931.

The Truth about Revisionism, with Eliezer Livneh, Aba Ahimeir, and Vladimir Jabotinsky. 1935.

Uri Tsevi Grinberg bi-melot lo shemonim. 1977.

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Critical Studies:

"The Tenth Muse—A Programatic Term in Uri Zvi Grinberg's Poetry and Journalism," in Chulyot, 1, 1993, pp. 124-47, and "The Albatrosses of Young Yiddish Poetry: Uri Zvi Grinberg's Albatros," in Prooftexts, 15, 1995, pp. 89-108, both by A. Lipsker; "Uri Zvi Greenberg between Isaiah and Plato" by Dr. Pinhas Ginossar, in Hamatkonet Vehadmut, edited by H. Weiss, 2000; "Poetry and History: The Case of U.Z. Greenberg" by Yehuda Friedlander, in Israel Affairs, 7(7), 2001.

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Although he did not experience the systematic destruction of European Jewry directly, having escaped Poland in 1930 for Palestine, Uri Zvi Greenberg's personal catastrophe carved deep cicatrices in the young poet's soul and led him to plunge his own autobiographical and psychological waters to sculpt characters and tales based on his own "heart of darkness." In Streets of the River the prophet-poet stirs the bleakest depths of his seared soul and unveils a magisterial, philosophical treatise that renders the Holocaust in an inventive, outstanding fashion. It is noteworthy that Greenberg, a scion of a Galician Hassidic family, was au courant with the traditional Jewish model of liturgy (kinah ) based upon the Book of Lamentations, which depicts, among others, the fall of Jerusalem and the exile to Babylon. Yet, Greenberg felt the need to partly jettison the fettering canonical shackles of the past in his search to craft and evoke the vast dehumanization and murder, as well as his personal grief. As a result, his ars poetica was a braiding of German expressionism and the ancient paradigms of Hebrew poetry, thus creating a whirlpool of rasping invectives, abrupt shifts in tone and tempo, and apocalyptic visions reminiscent of Jeremiah and the Midrashim.

It is also significant that as a soldier in the Austrian army in the years 1915-17, Greenberg was witness to the brutal pogroms that took place in Poland. These seismic events ruptured the core of Jewish society and created an aperture from which it never recovered. It is not too much to say that the waves of anti-Semitic attacks deeply affected the young poet and left an indelible imprint upon his work that would become an exemplar of secular national sorrow. What's more, Greenberg's recurring frustration and anger were amplified by the fact that his warnings of an impending apocalypse were not given any credence by the sanguine populace but rather rejected as fanciful, adding to his rage. It followed that Greenberg would proclaim himself as the castigating oracle, the only one capable of recording and wrestling with this traumatic and terrible calamity.

The cycle of poems is typically infused with an extreme, violent polemic against the pillaging gentiles, freighted by manifold exclamation marks, stirring metaphors, epic images, and free, lengthy verse. And while Greenberg promotes the poetic persona á la Walt Whitman, the emphasis is often on the national myth and the collective memory of the Jewish disaster. Often is the case that Greenberg, with a nod to the early Hebrew poets, references quintessential Jewish symbols such as the family at the Sabbath table while at the same time accentuating his own voice as a metonymy for the whole people. As a matter of fact, Greenberg frequently describes the unspeakable slaughter through the mourning of his own family, affirming the individual voice and stressing the universality of the pain. In doing so the reader is positioned and is imperceptibly co-opted into imaginatively identifying with the experience from which they were excluded. It is thus not surprising that in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, given the paucity of Hebrew narratives responding to the mind-numbing terror, Greenberg's poetry was used by the state in Yom Ha'shoah commemorations and gradually assumed center stage in the nascent Israeli state's official position toward the remembering of the Holocaust.

—Dvir Abramovich

See the essay on Streets of the River: The Book of Dirges and Power.